Flagging off Season 4: Tech forecast for Hong Kong

Season 4 is around the corner, and we have our engines revving. Our Chief Engineer Vinit Patel talks about flagging off at Hong Kong as the team guns for the podium.

It’s been 4 months since we took the last chequered flag for Season 3. However, there has been no let-up in the Mahindra Racing development programme. The seeds for the M4Electro were in place well before the M3Electro started to show its true potential in Season 3. Our approach has been evolutionary, working with the same tech partners on the car and identifying areas wherein we could develop a little more, once the FIA opened up areas of the car for development. Our development work has been largely around exploiting these areas and has led to definite improvement in areas of performance and efficiency across the motor, control unit, MGU and gearbox among others.

The official combined tests at Valencia were good, and between those sessions and other tests we did rack up over 3000 km. However, Valencia was not exactly the representative of street races from the Formula E perspective. That said, we only have a small indication of our pace and potential for this season. The general consensus, however, is that we’ll be back up there in the top 8 or so, scrapping for points, podiums and wins, where the competition is the toughest.

...we’ll be back up there in the top 8 or so, scrapping for points, podiums and wins, where the competition is the toughest.

With Hong Kong being reasonably tropical, the humidity will play a large factor. One or two degrees’ ambient temperature could make all the difference, making thermal efficiency more of an issue to control than energy.

We expect this year to be even tighter in terms of the first 10 cars on the grid being spread across just 0.3–0.4 seconds and the fastest lap coming down to who’s been able to save energy and who hasn’t. Hong Kong being a short and tight circuit, small differences and marginal gains will make all the difference.

I’m sure all teams are keen to get going again. Kicking off the season with a double header gives us two shots at having a brilliant start to the season. We’ve had some pretty good second races of the double headers in the last season, so we need to iron out some issues and flaws to ensure that we can make the double headers major point scoring outings for Mahindra Racing.

Kicking off the season with a double header gives us two shots at having a brilliant start to the season.

We really look forward to picking up where we left off as the title contender!